Harlem Shuffle
Page 15
An instant camera was fine, Carney decided. Pick it up tomorrow during business hours. Normal-people business hours.
Down the street, the Times Square light show blazed, half power at this time of night but still magnificent. He’d never seen it from this angle before, from Forty-Seventh—the light emerging from the bend on Seventh Ave as if cast from some terrible radiant creature lurching into view. He had this constant sense these days of pushing through into somewhere else. Step outside your known streets and different laws apply, crooked logic. His thoughts turned to those kids’ stories about toys waking to their true lives once their masters go to sleep, and wondered what silent switcheroos unfolded on those big marquees and billboards when no one was looking.
He descended into the subway, hustling at the wail of the arriving train. Perhaps on the street above, as in a story for children, the big black letters rearranged themselves into new names and words, and ten thousand blinking lights expounded in an unseen, after-hours performance. Spelling out philosophical declarations. Statements of universal truth. Cries for help and understanding. And maybe among them, an affirmation intended for him and him alone: a perfect message of hate, inscribed upon the city itself.
FOUR
Marie’s mother liked baked goods. Cakes, cookies, cobbler, seasonal pies redolent of her Alabama youth. Marie obliged her. Ever since she came on as secretary, Carney’s Furniture provided a small supply of baked goods for Carney and Rusty, delighted customers, crooks, and the occasional white policeman. Most mornings, Marie left a glass plate on the small table outside her office door, and last night’s labor was crumbs by lunchtime. Her specialty was a lemon-orange chiffon cake.
Detective Munson was a fan. When Carney showed up for their meeting that August morning, the cop was already there, trying to ease the recipe out of Marie. In the man’s arsenal of interrogation methods, today’s was among the most gentle, and of his various investigations, this was certainly the sweetest. Marie didn’t crack. “Mostly you pay attention to what you’re doing,” she told the cop with a tight smile. Carney was on time for the meeting, Munson was early. It was unclear whether the cop was jockeying for position or merely hungry.
The treat supply was not the only improvement to Carney’s Furniture in recent months. Sable Construction had delivered an eye-watering bill for their services, but they’d done a splendid job; there was no indication that the showroom had once been half the size. The latest lines from Argent and Collins-Hathaway, the gazelle-limbed dining chairs and boomerang side tables, posed elegantly in the bakery’s former counter and seating area. The ovens, stoves, and various other equipment had been sold to a junk dealer, and the new robin’s-egg blue paint job turned out to be a fine complement to this season’s palette, which was heavy on pastels. As he led his customers through the space, Carney had started telling them, “If you can’t find it, you don’t need it,” and the reaction—a small smile and an expansion of their stroll through the store—had made him add the line to his newspaper advertisements. At the back of the store, he’d allocated space for Marie and the ever-multiplying file cabinets. Given her love for baking, Marie’s hire was almost a tribute to the vanished establishment.
Carney kept his office in the same place, with the addition of the door to Morningside Avenue, that side entrance for special clientele.
They knew to come at night, the thieves, by appointment only, and if they came knocking during store hours Carney cut them out—find another dealer. Any questions Rusty and Marie had regarding Carney’s shady visitors, they kept them to themselves. Rusty was preoccupied with his impending marriage and scraping together a proper nest egg for him and his future bride. She was a prim little thing, Beatrice, a soft-spoken hummingbird who’d grown up two towns over from Rusty back in Georgia. They’d discovered each other in the church choir last year while lining up for punch. Their favorite places back home overlapped, and up here they’d found a common melody in the city. She laughed at Rusty’s weird hayseed humor and he called her “my pet,” out of some movie. Rusty did not complain when Carney asked him to step up at work the last few weeks.
For Marie’s part, Carney gathered she was too grateful for the job and too exhausted to be curious. She lived on Nostrand Ave in Brooklyn with her mother and younger sister. One was lame, the other ailing; it was hard to keep track. Marie was the only one bringing home a paycheck. Any tentative picture of her home life came solely from quotes from her mother: “My mother says these cookies can get tricky if you don’t use shortening,” “My mother says you need to let it rest near an open windowsill, so the breeze can pitch in.” Carney recognized her air of rehearsed competency from his own high-school days, after his mother had passed, his father was out slinking, and he was raising himself. That burden of carrying an apartment on your back; you stagger sometimes but you take the weight, what else can you do? Twenty-two young women answered his ad. Marie’s diploma from the Executive Typing School on Forty-Fourth Street clinched it. “Training Fingers for Industry.” She carried it in a fake leather folder.
Marie was a broad-backed gal with a short torso and skinny legs; the overall effect was a taper, as if she sprouted from the earth like a tree. Given her affable personality, a sturdy tree of dependable shade. She was fast, efficient, and, yes, overlooked the occasional odd creature who came knocking to her boss’s office. She adapted to the Pepper system without comment.
See, not long after the Theresa job, Pepper started using the furniture store as an answering service. One November night near closing, the phone rang.
“It’s Pepper,” he said, although if he’d said nothing Carney would have recognized him. The man harbored a telltale silence.
“Pepper,” Carney said.
“You got a message for me?”
“Sorry?”
“You got a message for me?”
Flummoxed. Carney peered out into 125th to see if he was calling from the phone booth across the street. He stammered and Pepper’s sigh cut him short.
“They call for me,” Pepper said, “you get me the message.” He hung up.
The next day Rusty told him that someone had asked after a Pepper, but it sounded like a drunk up to mischief. After that, Carney kept a yellow legal pad by the phone for Pepper’s inscrutable messages. To flatter them with the word enigmatic would have been dressing a pig in a tuxedo. They were a ragtag code of times, places, and objects shorn of referents, the recognizable world stripped to a series of grunts. Reduced to the Job.
Tell Pepper eleven o’clock. Bring the case.
It’s on at the place. I’ll be there half-past.
Make sure Pepper brings the keys. I’ll be out back under the thing.
Carney told Rusty, then Marie, that the mysterious recipient was an old friend of his father’s, a daffy old coot. No family to speak of, it was sad, really. When Pepper called in a few hours later, he identified himself and repeated the message with his own intonation as if pondering ancient mysteries—“It’s on at the place”—and then hung up. Months might go by until the next contact.
Detective Munson popped the last corner of a pink cookie into his mouth. “Could eat your cookies all day,” he said. If Marie picked up on the innuendo she made no sign.
“Detective,” Carney said.
“The man is all business,” Munson said, to make Marie a conspirator in her boss’s squareness. She shut the door behind them when they entered Carney’s office.
There was a Collins-Hathaway sling-back chair for guests, but Munson sat on Carney’s Ellsworth safe. It was a modest number, dark gray with a levered handle. Carney didn’t have an etiquette book in front of him, but he was sure it was bad manners to sit on a man’s safe.
The detective draped his sports jacket over his arm. Carney shut the blinds.
“I should come here for breakfast every day,” the cop said. “What do you think?”
/> “They’re for customers.”
“You ain’t trying to sell me on something? What’s up that couldn’t wait until Thursday?”
Thursday was when Munson usually picked up his envelope. After the Theresa heist, Chink Montague had broadcast the names of all the uptown fences to get a line on his girlfriend’s necklace. It had the effect of listing Carney in the crooked yellow pages, and Munson came calling.
In that first meeting, the detective forgave Carney for not paying tribute earlier. “Perhaps you didn’t understand how things work. Now I’m telling you how they work.”
“Sure, some of what I sell has been previously owned,” Carney had said.
“I know how it is. Sometimes shit shows up on your doorstep. Who knows where it comes from or why. But there it is, like a deadbeat relative, and you got to deal with it.”
Carney crossed his arms.
“I’ll come by on Thursdays. You here on Thursdays?”
“Every day, like the sign says.”
“Thursdays then. Regular. Like church.”
Carney didn’t go to church. Blasphemers on one side of the family, skeptics on the other, and both sides liked to sleep in. But he understood paying bills on time, and now there was another outstretched hand every week.
Carney had kept Thursday as the container of their transactions. Until today.
Munson slouched and stretched out his legs. He reminded Carney of the mouthy deputy in a Western, cocksure and cracking jokes, and liable to get offed before the final reel. Munson was too smart for such an ignominious exit; when the outlaws came to town, he’d hide in the stables until the gunfire ceased and then step out and check the lay of the land.
Carney’s associates had filled him in on Munson’s story. He’d worked downtown in Little Italy before getting transferred to Harlem. Working vice was a PhD in Shakedown Sciences. Mafia links, no doubt. In his new post, in addition to clearing the occasional case, he acted as a sort of diplomat for uptown’s criminal element, stepping in to cool out turf disputes between gangs and peddlers or to make sure competing numbers routes didn’t get tangled up. There was a flow of envelopes, and peace preserved the unimpeded traffic of those envelopes. A man who kept the peace was valuable indeed.
“It’s not about your piece,” Carney said. “I have some information you could use.”
“You. For me.”
“You always say, ‘If you hear anything.’ ”
“And you always say you’re a humble furniture salesman, trying to make a living.”
“Which is true. I have something up your alley. And maybe you could help me out, too.”
“Spit it out, Jesus Christ.”
It’s Biz Dixon, Carney said. He could provide a map for his arrest. “I don’t need to sell you on a high-profile bust, do I? Up in Albany, you’ve got Governor Rockefeller’s drug task force trying to make inroads, the state assembly giving millions of dollars for addiction treatment, and nothing happens. It gets worse. Every day in the papers they’re talking about all the young kids hooked on junk, the streets too dangerous to walk down—”
“I’m acquainted with the drug scourge, Carney.”
“Of course. It’s ripping Harlem apart. Like last week, that shootout on Lenox. Broad daylight. People are saying it was Biz Dixon’s guys who shot that little girl walking by.” He had been making salesman hand gestures, as if trying to close the deal on a dinette set. “What I’m saying is, I know where he operates—where he keeps his stash.” Stash wasn’t in his vocabulary and it showed. “I think it’s a raid you’d like to have your name on. Roust. Bust.”
“Man, what do you know about what I like and don’t like?” Munson sat up. “Who’s Dixon to you?”
“I grew up with him. Knew him then, know who he is now.”
“And what’s your angle?”
Carney gave him the name: Cheap Brucie.
Munson cocked his head. “The pimp? What do you care about him for?”
It was a good question. Carney had been asking that himself lately. A month ago he hadn’t even heard of the man. “He’s a crook,” he said.
“If being a crook were a crime, we’d all be in jail,” Munson said. “He’s got friends.”
“A man’s got friends so you don’t do your job?”
“It’s not my job to pick up a man because a civilian, who I know happens to be bent, asks me to. Your envelope ain’t that fat.”
“He should be locked up.”
“I should be locked up, this loony bin bullshit.”
At Carney’s expression, the detective took off his hat. He spun it around on his fingertips by the brim.
“It’s like this,” Munson said. “There is a circulation, a movement of envelopes that keeps the city running. Mr. Jones, he operates a business, he has to spread the love, give an envelope to this person, another person, somebody at the precinct, another place, so everybody gets a taste. Everybody’s kicking back or kicking up. Unless you’re on top. Low men like us, we don’t have to worry about that. Then there’s Mr. Smith, who also runs a business, and he’s doing the same thing if he is a wise and learned soul and wants to stick around. Spreading the love. The movement of the envelopes. Who is to say which man is more important, Mr. Jones or Mr. Smith? To whom do we give our allegiance? Do we judge a man by the weight of the envelope—or whom he gives it to?”
He seemed to be saying that Dixon paid protection, and that there was another peddler also laying out ice, and that some sort of arbitration had to occur. So where did that leave matters?
Munson stuck his arms into his sports jacket and beat it to his next shakedown. The jacket was a plaid number that made him look like Victor Mature, second feature in a matinee. Had Victor Mature played a mouthy deputy? Carney was sure of it. More than once. “I’ll look into it—both things,” the detective said. “Ask around if Dixon’s up or down these days. Maybe someone’s interested in what you got.”
On the way out, Munson asked Marie when she was going to make those little snack cakes again, the ones with that stuff on top.
The circulation of envelopes. It reminded Carney of his idea about churn, the movement of merchandise—cabinet TVs, easy chairs, stones, furs, watches—in and out of people’s hands and lives, between buyers, dealers, and the next buyer after that. Like an illustration in a National Geographic story about the global weather, showing the invisible jet streams and deep-fathom currents that determine the personality of the world. If you took a step back, if you were keyed in, you might observe these secret forces in action, how it all worked. If you were keyed in.
Had it been a dumb play, to make his pitch to the cop? Last night he’d spent the entire stretch between his first and second sleep scrutinizing the setup as if it were something out of Moskowitz’s safe, the most precious of stones. Tilting it to and fro, challenging the light to reveal its planes and facets. Checking for color, identifying flaws. He approved. And with that, his midnight plans broke through to his other, daytime life.
* * *
* * *
The rest of the day was store business. He summoned Rusty for his opinion on when they should put the rest of the fall line on the floor.
“I’d like to see it out there,” Rusty said. “I think they’ll be keen on it.”
He was confident. It was nice to see. Carney thanked him for picking up the slack the last few weeks.
“Thank you for letting me do more, Ray,” Rusty said. “Any time you want to spend more time with family, I’m here.”
“It’s been nice, seeing them every night.” Carney described his routine lately. Hanging out with his family, going to bed early, getting up again. Minus the revenge part.
“So you go to bed at eight? That’s a lot of sleep.”
“No, I get up and do paperwork. Read. Then I go back to sleep again.”
“It’s not like that. It’s your body telling you what it wants, and then you do it. That’s how we did it in the old days.”
“Like how now?” The appearance of a prospective ottoman buyer spared them more discussion. They got a bunch of customers toward the end of the day and before Carney knew it, it was quitting time.
John’s wailing greeted him at home. According to May, John had stuck the hand of her Raggedy Ann doll into his mouth so she grabbed it away, and he was overcome by loss. Elizabeth rocked the boy and in a gesture of hubris Carney took him from her arms. Which made him cry more. Which made Carney give him back. He retreated to the hall to hang up his jacket.
Dinner was finishing off last night’s roast beef and potatoes. Since he sacked out early these days, he was not staying late at the store, which meant that for most of the summer the four of them had dinner together. It was a pleasant development, and probably why Elizabeth didn’t get on his case about his odd sleeping hours. In late July, he realized it was the longest stretch of family dinners he’d ever had. Before his mother’s death, his father had rarely been around at meal time, and after that, scarcer still. Dorvay was a period of focused rage; its counterweight was dinnertime, delighting in his wife and kids.
He liked to stare at their faces when he could, and he kept wondering, how can someone you love seem so strange? When John was born, he had Carney’s nose and eyes—they say nature plans it that way. So the father knows the baby’s his, Certificate of Authenticity. Almost two years on, Carney wasn’t so sure anymore if his son looked much like him. May, for her part, still had Elizabeth’s graceful features and keen gaze. But John was already going his own way, and he could barely speak. Who will he be twenty years from now, how close or how far from the blueprint? Will there be some of Carney in there? Carney, on the other hand, hewed to Big Mike more and more all the time. No, he wasn’t smacking tire irons on kneecaps, but the original foundation held him up, unseen in the dirt.